May 3, 2018

What's past is prologue*

It seems like every week I read something that asserts something to the effect of "you can't change the past, so work on changing your future."

Since forever I've silently concurred with this point of view, until yesterday when the penny finally dropped.

It occurred to me that Faulkner was right when he wrote** "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

If all we have of our past is what we remember and if, as is becoming evident, every time we remember something it's different from the previous time we remembered it, then it would seem obvious that we change the past every time we summon it up from wherever it is that memory exists.